A great brand position, brand promise or even strategy that sits in a deck without being used is 100% worthless. So while thinking strategically is a great start, you need to activate the brand in order to see your employer brand’s value. While we’ve talked about specific channels and media before, we’ve never thought through […]

While I’m a big believer and proponent of opening the doors to let everyone find frustration and satisfaction at work, as a middle-ages white guy, I always feel out of my depth. Luckily, I know a guy who lives and breathes diversity. We have yet another rambling conversation on what its going to take to […]

Haven’t we been doing this recruiting thing for a LONG time already? Does it feel like we’re not really getting any better at it, that we’re all throwing up our hands and giving up that things can be better. And if we look at recruiters and sourcers and HRBPs and hiring managers as independent actors […]

Today, we try a little experiment and talk to my friend and recruitment marketing genius Tracey Parsons. Topics covered along the way: why doesn’t the business work well with recruiting, creating surprise and delight in candidates and just how low the bar is t0 making most candidates thrilled to apply. If you enjoyed this “experiment,” […]

How do you define “strategy?” Go ahead. I’ll wait. It’s a lot harder than you might expect. Now take the definition and see how it fits as your employer brand strategy. A little awkward? Here’s the deal: it’s very rare that any of us are taught “strategy” as a concept, and yet our jobs depend […]

It’s so much easier to work on and with the things we control. But… that’s pretty limiting, isn’t it? Especially in our jobs where we control almost nothing at all. If you want to succeed as an employer brand or recruitment marketing pro, the smart move is to ignore the things we control and focus […]

If your employer brand is the perception someone has about what it must be like to work there. where does that perception come from? More to the point, what can we do to influence and shape that perception? The answer isn’t a campaign or a project, tool or seminar. The answer is in building great […]

Freshly back from Talent Brand Summit an 100+ employer brand pros, I was struck by how much we talk of tactics, strategies, optimizations, tools and metrics, but very very very little about emotions. But people won’t do anything until they feel something. So let’s start talking about eliciting and sparking emotions in candidates. Show Notes […]

How much time do you think you spend on the tools you and your team use to source and recruit? Add in vendor demos and evaluation trials and internal conversations (not to mention budget conversations) and it adds up. But how often have those tools worked out? How often have they delivered the promised results? […]

Your custom-designed and unique-to-you recruiting process that you developed is 99.995% the same as everyone else’s. When you do everything the same, you attract people who know how to pretend to be the same. Not only does that make it near impossible to understand what makes a candidate different, it also tells the world that […]

Why I Hate and Love Resumes

There’s something fundamentally flawed about the resume process. So much so, companies like Zappos are looking to get away from them completely. Here’s why I hate and love resumes with almost equal measure:

“I select what to show you, you try and read between the lines about what I chose not to say, you try to turn that into a more complete picture of who I might really be, and then decide if that’s the kind of person you need right now. And you need to do it in about 30 seconds.

That’s why I hate resumes. We pretend they are something they aren’t, and they end up being like kabuki theater: I show you what I think you want to see, and you look for what isn’t there.”